Fabrice Bellet

Fedora contributor

I maintain the official packages for Fedora providing the Flightgear open-source,
multi-platform flight simulator, and a couple of related software, fgrun, the FlightGear
launcher, and Atlas, a
cool tool providing high-quality maps based on FlightGear Sceneries, and
also a flying-assistance companion.

As part of my work, I also provide some other unofficialFedora packages, for
scientific sofware, including CERN's Geant4 simulation toolkit, ODIN the object-oriented
development interface for NMR, AMIDE, a medical imaging data
examiner, and some other.

Free Software contributions

While using Fedora for my linux desktop, I happen to encounter
sometimes bugs and misbehaviors in the applications I use. Even if these
bugs are reported upstream, they may not be fixed immediately
for a variety of reasons (the developers cannot reproduce the problem
for example, or the patch is too ugly and not generic enough),
so I needed I way to quickly fix the software, when I could.

For this goal, I maintain a local repository of RPM
packages for Fedora, mostly following the official packages releases,
and just including some patches when needed. There's no warranty that
theses packages work for you, but they may help.

Another of my interests is the MAME,
Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and more specifically the MESS project, that targets old vintage
8-bits computer that existed in the eighties. I started using computers
with such a
beast, a long time ago... MAME is a very interesting tool to emulate
such an old
computer, because it focuses on the emulation quality of each
hardware chip that composes a machine, which makes MAME very generic
because a given emulated chip may appear in a lot of emulated machines,
and emulating a complete machine is relatively straighforward, by
providing the definition of the relations between these emulated chips
together. MAME with its integrated debugger is also an incredible tool
to provide an ubiquitous view of the way these old computers worked
internally: it is now possible in MAME to follow the execution
of the emulated processor instruction per instruction, to inspect its
registers, to change its memory, to set breakpoints, all of these
actions at the level of the emulated machine. It becomes possible to
discover clever and efficient programming tricks by the people, who
wrote the code for these computers initially.

I'm also interested in the software stack that allows audio and video
chat capabilities between linux users, without relying on proprietary
source and protocols, starting from the empathy GNOME software, the telepathy
communication framework, including the XMPP protocol, the GStreamer multimedia
framework, and going to the low level communication elements, Farstream,
libnice, implementing
the required RFC for ICE, STUN and TURN. These components
require some fine-tuning, patches and customization to make them work
together in the expected way.

I contributed to some patches in the software allowing geolocation in
linux, using commodity hardware like broadband modem cards, typically
including GPS capabilities. The GPS raw data are provided to the system
with the ModemManager
software. Another component like Geoclue gathers geolocation
data from various source with different accuracy, the GPS being one of
them, but also GSM cell tower geolocation, Wifi ESSID positions,
collected by the Mozilla
Location Service, and provides it to other part of the the linux
desktop that requires geolocation service, for example GNOME Maps, Empathy or Firefox.

RPMFind

I maintain the RPMFind server in
my lab, thanks to CISR for
providing the needeed bandwidth, that I could certainly not afford. The
goal of this service is to provide mirroring capabilities for popular
RPM-based linux distributions, and also and mainly an html
representation of the content of RPM packages (set of included files,
change logs, dependencies, aggregated information per distribution...).
RPMFind offers a search engine on top of all this indexed metadata,
which allows to query for package details in an independant way of a
particular linux distribution.

Unix docs

I wrote some documentation about Unix practice for the new students
in my laboratory in French. This stuff is really messy, and
incomplete. So contributions and are welcome to improve this
document.

PHD Thesis

I obtained a PHD thesis in 1998, at the Grenoble INP, France. I worked in
the TIMC laboratory under the
responsibility of Catherine
Garbay in the Computer Vision field.

You can grab my report as a postscript file or as LaTeX sources
in french, as well as the slides of my talk in french
too :